At the forefront of all serious revolutions in history is the simple slogan: cancel the debts and redistribute the land. As a result, one of the first acts after a revolution is to destroy tax and debtor records, as well as land contracts.
Why? Debt involves not the generous offer of support from a creditor to a lender, but the net flow of wealth and power to the creditor. The current situation in Europe is but the latest example of this pattern of exploitation. Thus, any serious revolution destroys the pattern.
12 May, 2012 at 9:52 am
I guess you like Graeber’s new book…
12 May, 2012 at 9:58 am
It has a few problems, but it’s a breathtaking read. He draws that slogan from Moses Finley.
12 May, 2012 at 12:46 pm
I find it intriguing that that is exactly what the biblical Year of Jubilee was supposed to be. As I as I’ve heard, no one ever enacted it, but there must have been at a least a scribe or two who thought it was a good idea. Makes me wish I knew more about Marxist approaches to the history of “biblical Israel.”
12 May, 2012 at 1:08 pm
Graeber actually finishes the book with a call for a biblical-style Jubilee. The catch with that is that the Jubilee was a system-restoring mechanism, letting off excess pressure so the economic system could keep functioning. A comparable situation is the EU ‘persuading’ banks to write down part of Greece’s supposed debt, but only if Greece undertakes crippling ‘austerity’ measures. Instead, the abolition of debt is but the first item in a much longer revolutionary list. The next is smashing the system of debt itself, along with the moral code that one ‘must pay one’s debts’. But that includes destroying the class responsible for maintaining that system … and so on.
12 May, 2012 at 1:26 pm
On a different biblical note, have you heard of Douglas Campbell’s book “The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul?” It strikes me that he sees Paul (albeit via an idiosyncratic reading that no one else agrees with) doing basically the same thing in the realm of theological ethics as Graeber seems to be advocating as far as economics. Campbell claims that readings of Paul have been conditioned by political systems that value retributive justice, repayment of debt, etc., and have missed that that ideology was exactly what Paul was against (but he buys that reading at the price of claiming that most of Romans 1-3–the unpleasant parts, of course–are simply Paul parodying his opponents).
12 May, 2012 at 1:49 pm
I haven’t read it, but obviously should (will ask Dick Horsley about it as well). By the sound of it, Campbell would be part of the antinomian tradition, stressing Paul’s ‘not under the law, but under grace’. Late in life, E. P. Thompson discovers this revolutionary tradition among the radical Christian ‘sects’ in England – where Blake and the Muggletonians fit.